Healthcare organizations face unique requirements when it comes to retiring clinical systems. Understanding the various approaches to extraction, transformation, and storage of the contents of clinical systems is critical to correctly assessing their suitability for a usable and compliant healthcare data archival.

To understand why some archival approaches are superior to others, it’s useful to visualize the way each of the solutions extract, store, and visualize data. The methodologies used typically trade fidelity (how well it preserves the original shape and precision of the data) for accessibility (how easy it is to get at the information you need), and they trade how easily the solution can archive disparate sources of data (such as archiving both an EMR and a time-tracking system) with, again, accessibility. The primary considerations used in this methodology are as follows:

There are certainly other ways to judge an archival solution. For instance, an important factor may be whether or not the solution is hosted by the archival vendor on-premises or remotely. Some factors, such as the reliability of the system, service level agreements, or its overall licensing cost are big inputs into the equation as well, but those aren’t necessarily specific to the overall healthcare data archival strategy utilized by the solution. There are also factors that are so critical, such as security and regulatory compliance, that deficiencies in these areas are deal-breakers.

Download the free whitepaper, where we delve into the specific healthcare data archival strategies being used in the marketplace.